by Jane Leavy
Church records do show that he was baptized for a second time at St. Mary’s on August 7, 1906, received his First Communion “as a convert” one week later, and was confirmed the following spring, on May 7, 1907. The brothers weren’t taking any chances with his soul.
He was still there on Thanksgiving 1908, appearing in blackface in a school minstrel show called “One Thousand Smiles in One Thousand and Twenty Minutes,” while downtown his father and other members of the dance committee at his social club were supervising a holiday ball for children of the membership at Maennerchor Hall. The mention of G. Ruth among the named cast members in the next morning’s Sun was likely the first time his name appeared in print.
Considine has George Jr. living at home again in 1911–12, at which point his father returned him to St. Mary’s and left him there until his final discharge.
The first and most formative account of his childhood, published in August 1920, was the handiwork of an unsentimental young reporter named Westbrook Pegler, just breaking into the business with the United News Service when he was charged with the responsibility of confecting an 80,000-word, twelve-part newspaper serial in Ruth’s voice, without the benefit of hearing it for more than fifteen minutes.
His George is forthright, admitting in the first sentence that St. Mary’s was a reform school, which, in Pegler’s account, he was to leave only once in twelve years, at Christmas 1902.
“After about six months I was given a holiday leave of absence to go home,” Pegler has Little George say. “I think father was pleased with the change the brothers had already worked in me. It seemed he and I had come to think alike. . . . At any rate, when we talked together we had an understanding which we had not had before and were more like good friends and companions than father and son.”
Mamie Ruth Moberly, the only member of the family who survived long enough to bear witness to events in the Ruth household, always maintained her brother was committed to St. Mary’s because he wouldn’t go to school. Truancy was an issue in the city, especially after the new law mandating compulsory attendance went into effect in the fall of 1902. With that law came a new, highly motivated corps of attendance officers.
But he was too young for school when he was first consigned to St. Mary’s in June 1902. And city schools were just letting out for the summer. He was no truant then. Moberly said it was her job to walk him through the school door and make sure he didn’t walk right back out. But she was just two years old, far too young to remember those events, much less to act as an enforcer.
In her last interview with Gibbons in March 1992, she said her brother came home mostly on holidays and as an occasional reward for good behavior in the years that George Sr. ran the bar on Conway Street. On those occasions good behavior was not sustained. Brother Paul, St. Mary’s superintendent, would remind the adult Babe about a time when he was released at his father’s request but immediately “hooked” school, as Mamie put it, getting her in lots of trouble.
“They said, ‘He either has to go to school or we’re going to put him in the state thing,’” Moberly told Gibbons. “Daddy said, ‘You’re not going to put him in a state thing. If he’s going anywhere I’m going to put him in St. Mary’s.’”
The home that he returned to was hardly a peaceable one. “He wouldn’t listen to my father,” Moberly said. “My father would talk to him and talk to him. And it’d go in one ear and out the other. Oh, I’ll never forget one time—my father was beating him. He was a big boy. As a boy, he was big. My father’d get him across the knee and beat his butt. I says, ‘Don’t hit him like that. You’re hurting him.’”
Little George escaped from his father and she went to him. “My father said, ‘If you don’t get away from him I’ll give you some of it,’” Moberly said. “I knew he wasn’t going to touch me. But I thought I better get away. Babe stood at the kitchen door. If my father had gotten ahold of him, there wouldn’t have been a Babe Ruth.
“He said, ‘You dirty old SOB, I hate you.’
“If my father had got him, he would have beat him ’til there wasn’t any life left in him. They both had vicious tempers.”
Little as she was—Katie was no bigger than four foot ten—“she didn’t mind boxing your ears either,” Moberly said. “She was something. I’d say, ‘Mother, why did you hit me?’ She said, ‘You ran the last time you were supposed to be corrected.’ That’s the Germans for you.”
Mamie did not escape unscathed the anger and violence in the home. When she ran away to get married at age sixteen, she left with a trousseau of emotional problems, compounded by the death of two infant sons before she gave birth at age nineteen to her only surviving child. She would suffer episodes of instability throughout her life, her granddaughter Jan McNamee said. “She had a happy life except for her demons.”
Pegler’s fanciful summation of Ruth’s childhood is an insult to credulity, ascribing to seven-year-old George Jr. a degree of insight that he never possessed as an adult. But there is truth, if not fact, in Pegler’s conclusion. At the end of the Christmas holiday in 1902, Pegler’s Little George resists the temptation to ask permission to stay at home lest he risk his father’s newfound faith in him, and heads back to St. Mary’s for the better part of his childhood. “As the months multiplied into years the arrangement seemed to become the natural disposition of the family.”
IV
Seven-month-old William and five-year-old Mamie would have been asleep in their beds in the early morning of March 12, 1906, when George Sr. confronted his wife, telling her he had evidence that she had been sleeping with his bartender, George Sowers.
“I the under sign fucked Mrs Geo. H, Ruth March 12 1906 on her dinging room floor whitch She ask me to do Geo Sowers.”
The next morning, George Sr. swore out a warrant against Katie, charging her with drunkenness and infidelity.
Magistrate Daniel Loden at the Western District police station issued a warrant for their arrest and took statements from each of the parties. Katie told Loden that Sowers had “taken advantage of her.” She said, “her husband and other people were in the house but . . . she had made no attempt to make an outcry,” Loden noted in his report.
She refused to confirm or deny her husband’s accusations and declined to press charges against Sowers.
Loden noted that Sowers had told the magistrate, in Katie’s presence, that “Mrs. Ruth was continually after him and that Mr. Ruth had accused her from time to time of being unfaithful to him, and that if he continued to accuse her, she would in reality commit the deeds that he had accused her of, whereupon Sowers remarked, ‘When you make up your mind, I hope you let me have the first crack at you.’
“She continually followed Sowers around the bar where he was employed as bar-tender. . . . From that time on Sowers said she seemed to look for it as regularly as she did her meals, and of course he liked it and was ready to accommodate her.”
Katie was found guilty of violating Section 5 of Article 27 of Public General Laws, “having unlawful sexual intercourse with another man not her husband,” and fined $10.00 and costs, according to court records. But the fine was remitted, and the case dismissed on costs of $1.70 when she told the authorities she had an infant and no means of support.
On March 17, George Sr. filed for divorce, seeking custody of all three children, and posted a legal notice in the Sun notifying creditors that he was no longer responsible for his wife’s debts.
At a preliminary hearing on April 6, her attorney argued that she was destitute and asked for twenty dollars for legal fees and ten dollars a week in permanent alimony in order to be able to support the children—the only indication in the paperwork that she might have had custody of them at the time. In court papers, Katie said that George Sr. cleared thirty dollars a week after expenses at the West Conway Street bar.
The judge ordered George Sr. to pay Katie three dollars a week in alimony through the duration of the case and fifteen dollars in legal fees.
Depositions in the case of George H. Ruth Sr. v. Katie Ruth were scheduled for April 11 at the Fidelity Building. Katie failed to appear. No one testified on her behalf.
Sowers did not appear either. George Sr. said his attorneys had been unable to locate Sowers since the night he had kicked him out of the house. “I think he has skipped for good,” George said.
Ward Baldwin Coe, a Standing Examiner of the Circuit Courts of Baltimore City, presided over the depositions. The only two witnesses were Magistrate Loden and George Sr. himself.
In his deposition, George came across as well spoken and well coached by his attorney, Frank V. Moale. He affected the righteous tone of the cuckold as he testified that he had long suspected his wife of infidelity, which was the reason he had moved his family so often. He charged her with the crime of adultery with one George Sowers, of Baltimore City, and “with other men whose names are to your orator unknown.”
He said that he had not spoken to Katie, who had gone to live with her sister Lena a half mile away on Portland Street, since she had come to collect her clothes, and had not seen her except when she passed by in the street as she did every day.
Q. What has been your conduct toward your wife during all your married life?
A. I always was faithful to my family, and cared for them in every way, shape, and form. I always treated her kindly. Sometimes she got drunk and I would tear up a little with her, but I never beat her or anything of that kind. I was always kind and affectionate. Just three weeks before this thing happened, I gave her $45.00 to buy clothes, which put the business in a bad way.
Q. How did your wife treat you?
A. Well, outside of her drinking, she was alright, but she was always drunk. The children were lousy, and she was lousy herself, when she got drunk she would lay in a stupor. Drink was the cause of it all.
Q. When did you first have occasion to suspect your wife of being unfaithful to you?
A. On Monday morning, March 10, 1906, I came down stairs and found my wife under the influence of liquor, and I asked her if she had been out and she said, “No.” I had seen my wife and Sowers in close conversation, under suspicious circumstances. I went into the bar and asked the bar-tender, Sowers, if he gave my wife any whiskey, and he denied it at first but afterward said that when he had slipped out into the yard and came back in he saw my wife take a cup full of whiskey. I said no more that day, and the next night I went to bed with my wife and I asked her if Sowers ever made any improper propositions to her. She got excited, which aroused my suspicions and I told her then that I had accused Sowers down stairs, and that he had confessed to everything. I did this to see what she would say, and I said, “How many times did you have sexual intercourse with Sowers?” She said, “Once.” I then asked her when this occurred, and she said it was last week. This settled it in my mind and I then got out of bed and went into Mr. Sowers’ room, which is the adjoining room next to mine, and pulling the bed clothes off of him, I grabbed him by the neck and accused him of being intimate with my wife. I took him into my room in the presence of my wife, and got her by the clothes, and got them together, and asked him what he had done to that woman, my wife. At first he said nothing, and I hit him once, and he said, “For God’s sake don’t hit me again, and I will tell you everything. I was going to tell you before.” (This all occurred in my wife’s presence.) Well, when he got his clothes on, I took him down stairs, into the bar, and got pen and ink and made him write what had happened.
George’s attorney submitted as evidence two statements signed by Sowers, the second in George’s hand, because Sowers was shaking so badly. (The chief difference between them is that dining room is spelled correctly in George’s version.) Initially, Sowers acknowledged only that he had “staid with Mrs. Ruth,” but ultimately confessed that they had been intimate for five weeks.
The cross-examination by Katie’s attorney proved ineffective, despite Sowers’s statement to police that George was pointing a pistol at him.
George responded with indignation. No one was going to challenge his manhood again.
Q. Mr. Sowers testified at the Station House, according to the testimony of Justice Loden, that you had a pistol in your hand. Did you have any such weapon?
A. No, not in my hand. I had a pistol in my coat pocket which I put in there when I closed the bar, and which I did not remember. Every night when I closed up I took that pistol and put it in my coat pocket. I never gave the pistol a thought, I was so excited. I had forgotten all about it. I didn’t need the pistol for the simple reason that it was man to man, and I was not afraid of him.
Notice of the divorce of George and Catherine Ruth appeared in the Baltimore Sun on May 15, 1906, just two months after she was arrested. The grounds were drunkenness and infidelity.
George Sr. was awarded custody of all three minor children. The final decree did not award Katie any alimony.
V
Baby William died on August 29, 1906, four days after his first birthday.
The cause of death was marasmus, the same diagnosis of infant malnutrition cited on Gussie’s death certificate. Unlike Gussie, William did not die at home. He was a patient at the Thomas Wilson Sanitarium for the Sick Children of Baltimore, a summer hospital located ten miles northwest of downtown. The Thomas Wilson Sanitarium was a progressive and philanthropic organization established in 1879 to treat infants suffering from gastrointestinal disorders during the summer heat when, in the years before pasteurization, milk supplies were most likely to be tainted. (Pasteurization would not become mandatory in Baltimore until 1917.)
Staff members operated four free milk stations within the city limits to help nourish babies unable to get pure milk in overheated, crowded neighborhoods. Nurses volunteered their services and paid follow-up visits after babies were discharged. Mothers were allowed to stay with their children throughout treatment at the sanitarium.
It is impossible to know whose custody William was in at the time of his death, or, in fact, whether either parent was with him. Though George had been granted legal custody, it was his brother William, for whom the baby was named, who was listed on the death certificate as “father and informant.”
Two of the four Ruth children for whom death records could be located in the Maryland State Archives succumbed to a combination of diseases that had no treatment in turn-of-the-century Baltimore—asthma, pneumonia, and spinal meningitis.
Two others, Gussie and William, died of malnutrition, a preventable condition.
The infant mortality rate in Baltimore in 1900 was approximately 10 percent, according to Christopher Boone, dean and professor at the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. By that standard, he said, the losses suffered by George and Katie Ruth were disproportionately high.
Babe’s daughter Julia said he never spoke about his dead siblings. The Considine autobiography quotes him as saying he had an older brother John who died “before he could be any help to me,” but there is no documentation in state archives of a child by that name, and Mamie Moberly claimed her brother was mistaken.
Shelby Fell Daugherty, a direct descendant of Katie’s sister Lena, has tried to research her family history in an effort to fill in genealogical gaps for her father. She has been frustrated by a lack of documentation and a familial tendency to keep things “hush-hush.” “There’s a lot of alcoholism on that side of the family,” she said. “Seems like [Katie] was a serious alcoholic.”
George and Katie reunited for William’s funeral—at least for appearances. The death announcement in the Sun read: “William E., aged 1 year, beloved son of George H. and Catherine Ruth. Funeral from his parents residence, No. 406 W. Conway St, this (Friday) afternoon at 3 o’clock.”
William was buried in the family plot in Loudon Park Cemetery, his coffin stacked on top of those of his siblings. The cemetery was just up the road from St. Mary’s, where two weeks earlier his brother had received his First Communion.
He was eleven years old, not so little anymo
re, old enough surely to understand this death, at least the fourth he had known in his young life. He never acknowledged their existence much less their loss or the divorce of his parents. Why would he? He never posed, publicly, the question that begs asking: What parents give up one of their two surviving children?
“I don’t think he wanted to remember his childhood,” Julia said. “With both parents alive, I would have thought that he would have resented that neither of them wanted him.”
In Considine’s telling, Ruth says, “I hardly knew my parents.”
In the hundredth-anniversary book published by the Birthplace and Museum, he says, “I think my mother hated me.”
Whatever the ins and outs of his institutional life may have been, one fact remains incontrovertible: each summons home and each subsequent commitment reprised the pain of the first repudiation.
Parental abandonment would become the defining and unacknowledged biographical fact of his life. It is the lens that clarifies; the mystery he would never explain.
That is what the movie critic for the Winnipeg Evening Tribune saw in his eyes projected on the big screen at the Province Theater where the lights were going down as Ruth hurtled through the night toward Manhattan. In the dark, it was there for anyone to see.
Chapter 3
October 11 / Trenton
HOME RUN KING AND LOU HERE FOR GAME AT HIGH SCHOOL FIELD
WILL NOT ARRIVE IN TIME FOR LUNCHEON
—TRENTON EVENING TIMES
HOME RUN TWINS CALL ON MOORE
STATE HOUSE “STENOGS” IN TURMOIL AS RUTH AND GEHRIG ARRIVE
—TRENTON EVENING TIMES
I
Babe Ruth swept into the great hall of Manhattan’s Pennsylvania Station either with or without two ladies of the night prominently clinging to his arm. He had or had not spent the night before in their company. Did or did not pat them on the derrière and tip them effusively, calling out to a pal among the assembled scribes, photogs, hangers-on, autograph addicts, and redcaps gathered to see him off: “Coupla beauts, eh?”
